Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, Anna Cobb, Michael Stuhlbarg, David Gordon Green
Intro:
… tantalising beauty mixed with brutality; a work of horror, a work of love, and one which eventually begs the audience to have empathy for those who are othered in society.
Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) makes a plea for compassion in his latest feature Bones and All, adapted from Camille DeAngelis’ YA novel by screenwriter David Kajganich.
Bones and All blends numerous genres; including horror, coming of age, the road trip across America, and romance to create a politically charged yet ultimately tender portrait of two people trying to find their place in the world – a world that can never accept their outsider status and one in which community is an impossible goal.
Set during the Reagan years, Bones and All is about forgotten people. Almost every character lives in poverty. Guadagnino uses the metaphor of cannibalism to explore people who have been abandoned – cannibals, or as they’re termed “eaters” and those who are consumed, both literally and metaphorically.
The story centres on Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell), a shy high school student who is trying to fit in. Her father (André Holland) appears overbearing, locking Maren in her room at night. Maren sneaks out one night to a slumber party and in a deceptively cosy scene where the girls listen to Duran Duran’s ‘Save a Prayer’, Maren leans into her friend and suddenly bites her finger off. Maren’s actions necessitate her father packing her up and moving to another town before the police catch up to them; something that it seems they’ve done many times before.
On her eighteenth birthday, Maren’s father disappears, leaving her a small amount of money, a tape where he relates her history of eating, and her birth certificate. Maren has been an eater since she was a child but has blacked out and forgotten most of the experiences. Abandoned and confused, she gets on a bus, hopefully to end up in Minnesota where she was born and find her mother and some answers.
Maren is akin to a newborn in the world of eaters. She’s unaware that she’s not unique until she meets the decidedly creepy Sully (Mark Rylance), who has smelled her (eaters can smell other eaters). Sully insists that he means her no harm, and takes her to what she first believes is his house.
It is soon revealed that Sully has chosen the house because the occupant is an old, soon to be dead, woman. Sully insists he doesn’t kill – he simply smells when someone is dying and waits for them to pass before feeding. The woman dies and Maren and Sully feast on her in a disturbingly grotesque manner. The eating is only one of the disturbing parts of the section with Sully. The woman before death is lying prone on the floor, helpless and alone. Maren at first wants to call an ambulance but her hunger and Sully prevent that. There’s also Sully’s woven braid of hair that he carries as a trophy of all the people he’s eaten. Maren can see that there is something distinctly off about Sully (perhaps he has descended into madness) and leaves the house almost immediately. Sully feels he has bonded with Maren and the film lets us know that it isn’t the last time we will see the bizarre character.
Maren is once again alone and without resources. She is shoplifting in a supermarket when she spies Lee (Timothée Chalamet). A man bullies a woman and Lee stands up for her. Afterwards, Lee consumes the man. Maren and Lee begin a tentative relationship as they drive away in the man’s truck. Lee has checked that his victim is a loner and probably won’t be missed – he has his own code of consumption. Maren explains that she is on her own and looking for her mother. Lee agrees to help her get to Minnesota after he makes a stop in Kentucky to take his sister Kayla (Anna Cobb) for driving lessons.
Maren and Lee’s relationship is tenderly rendered as they share their histories (Lee being more circumspect than Maren, who wants him to listen to her father’s tape). Two lonely hearts have found each other, and their romance is the only thing that feels like any kind of home for both of them.
They encounter other eaters on the road. Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green play abhorrent characters. The first, Jake, is an eater who extolls the virtues of consuming a person “bones and all”. The latter, Brad, is an ex-cop who is not a born eater but rather a “groupie.” The impossibility for Maren and Lee to fit in with other eaters is clear; they represent a grotesquery that neither young lover wants to recognise as their own.
Maren and Lee’s journey across Reagan’s America is punctuated by moments of visceral ugliness and serene beauty. When they are left to themselves in the natural world, the lovers are covered in a hazy glow (supplied by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan), but when they interact with society the results are either violent or depressing – hopelessness fills the frame.
Maren’s search for identity is one that leads her down a disappointing and shocking path. She has inherited her eater gene from her mother (Chloë Sevigny), who in a single scene symbolises where Maren may end up. Voiceless, she has left a letter for Maren in which a single line sums up all of Maren’s fears: “There’s no room for monsters in love.”
Guadagnino crafts a tragic story about outsiders trying to find a way to survive. Both Russell and Chalamet deliver brittle, sensitive, and heartfelt performances. The couple may be cannibals but that is almost a side issue for what the film is saying. The people who are dispossessed in the film are being cannibalised by America itself. The visceral gore is a motif that is used to further the horror of poverty, addiction, and America in the 1980s.
Bones and All is about many things; the all-consuming passion of first love, the desire to find a place to belong, and what being a “monster” really means. Both Maren and Lee just want to know they are good people in a society where good people are few and far between.
Guadagnino’s film is tantalising beauty mixed with brutality; a work of horror, a work of love, and one which eventually begs the audience to have empathy for those who are othered in society. There is a wealth of compassion to be found in Bones and All for those who can tolerate the gruesome violence. A strange and unsettling, but ultimately earnest and even, kind creation.
